In his first big interview since taking Facebook onto Wall Street with all the savoir-faire of a tramp in a dirty Santa outfit, internet billionaire Mark Zuckerberg has confessed that his company must do better. He added that performance of the free-content ad firm's stock "has obviously been disappointing".
The 28-year-old exec …

Re: Love the talk about search

It's all down hill from here. It no longer is fresh, exciting or even optimal. Things like this start off being useful but grow until they become a mess (See MySpace).

As soon as they float or get sold on the quality dips. It won't be long before there are calls for Zuckero to step down, only to get replaced by some career executive climber who has experience in running big IT giants but no idea of social media.

Floating just gave them the option to buy other companies instead of creating "cool" stuff.

Zuck's own words said it all though, it was about how they can grow the amount of advertising they push to mobile users. Not about what great new features are on the way.

That's my worthless theory for why Google became so big. It wasn't that their search engine was so much better than the others (yahoo, etc), it's just that they didn't clutter up the search page with lots of slow loading ads and entertainment news. Just a clear page with a textbox and a button saying "search" or "go" or whatever the hell it was.

I just checked and can't believe how much of a clone Bing is. Even the menu in the top left has kind of the same items in kind of the same order. But they've made a boo boo and covered their search screen with a big messy photo of autumn trees. Bad move imo...

You are absolutely right though about facebook I think. The more stuff they've added (including or should that be 'ad'ed) the more cluttered and chaotic it feels.

While not trying to be a "portal" (as I think it was called) certainly helped, we probably forget how much better Google was than its competitors when it came out. It simply worked considerably better.

And their real success was in figuring out how to do search engine advertising properly. Before Adwords, search engines used to monitise by charging for inclusion or for results. ie they either tried to make people pay to be spidered (reducing the quality of their results by not including/keeping up to date the vast majority who didn't pay), or by essentially hiding advertisers within their organic results (reducing their quality in exchange for cash).

Google had this idea that you could put clearly delineated ads that were triggered by search terms, squaring the circle of how to maintain quality search engine results while making so much money that it needed to be delivered in container ships.

@ Lord Voldemortgage

Interestingly, DuckDuckGo fell over almost as badly as Bing on that search term, which is surprising because it's normally quite geeky and generally returns good results for mathematical statements...

Google's top result was a Stackoverflow link explaining the significance of 2>&1 in piping stderr into stdout, which was about what I was expecting. Bing and DuckDuckGo both returned some Jewish-sounding marriage ministry as their top result. WTF?

Facebook is Doomed!

I am no expert but it seems clear to me that with so many users uploading staggering amounts of data (photos, videos) then the operating costs must be spiralling out of control. You've got to pay for the physical storage, engineers to maintain, backups etc - the costs must be astronomical!

The difficulty I think they have from an advertising point of view is that the event has already passed so they can't serve a relevant ad. Or put another way I email someone on gmail saying "fancy going to the cinema next week?" and gmail will serve an ad for cinema listings next week. Typical use on Facebook is to post a status update saying "went to see Batman last night and it was brilliant!". There is no point serving me an ad at that point because I've already done it. Same with attending weddings, parties, re-unions, holidays etc.

I don't know how they have got themselves into a corner where they are giving major corporations free advertising through the use of Facebook pages but that was just madness as well.

The only option I can think of is to do location based advertising on mobile combined with business intelligence and analysis of past user behaviour - e.g. an ad pops up on your device for shops that you are near that are a) open at that particular time and b) sell things you are likely to want.

Re: Facebook is Doomed!

storage is cheap tho

I can only guess that they want to be the platform and that soon their loyal users don't use the web but use facebook instead. That's the motivation for having search and explains the earlier, lunatic idea of a facebook phone. That way, they know even more about the users (not just what they've just done but what they are thinking of doing) and hey presto, they are the advertisers' choice. If that's the case, it's not everyone else who's under-estimating them but rather its them over-estimating themselves. I think Google et al might be quite resistant to the idea too.

Re: He's a glass half-empty kinda guy?

Facebook is not the social networking platform of the future

Facebook is a college yearbook website that expanded to accept non-students. It was never really a fully visualized social networking platform. The internet provides the capability to realise a truly radical and innovative vision of social networking, rather than the shallow platform Facebook delivers. We can do much much better and I believe in time people are realizing this, and Facebook will become the next Myspace and make way for something better.

Re: Facebook is not the social networking platform of the future

ultimately 2 facts will lead to the downfall of Facebook and the success of the network I have started building:

1. To be truly social requires the ability not just to communicate with friends but to make them initially, so that you can communicate with them.

2. Facebook allows no way for this to happen.

3. When my network cracks that nut, Facebook and Google will suffer massive attrition as friends are made and ultimately transferred over to my system: because for the first time people have a compelling reason not just to add sociopaths they don't talk to anymore, but also NEW people too that they might actually like to talk to.

4. Making friends has the side effect of making people more happy and more willing to spend.

5. Friendships stagnate, let's face it, people kinda suck don't they. Again, this causes attrition to Facebook, but they have implemented no easy way for the user to make replacement friends. So they just have to be alone. Not very fun.

What a

Not So Savy

I don't think Zuckerburg is that savy about what people actually want. All they are focused on is monetizing and they seem ready to do literally anything to do that. I don't think the concept itself, the Facebook proposition if you like, actually adds up yet and I'm wondering if it ever will. I understand they are no longer planning to make phones, what the hell was that all about anyway? the whole enterprise seems adrift at sea. And maybe it's for the best that things don't come together properly and we move onto something better.